The Kentucky Documentary Photographic Project

Help us cross the finish line!  

Inspired by the iconic images of rural America captured by the photographers of the Farm Security Administration in the 1930's and early 1940's, the original Kentucky Documentary Photographic Project (1975-77) undertook a 3 year photographic documentation of all the state’s 120 counties.  The work from those 3 years was shown at the Speed Art Museum, The Smithsonian American Art Museum, The George Eastman House, The Kentucky Historical Society, and a number of other venues.

In 2015 Ted Wathen and Bob Hower decided to renew the Project and survey the state again; to see what a fresh look might tell us about ourselves as Kentuckians. With a larger team of younger and more diverse photographers, we again photographed in all 120 counties, penetrating deeper into the culture, people, and land of Kentucky. A selection of that new work, combined with work from the 1970’s project, and images by the FSA photographers who photographed Kentucky in the late 1930’s and early 1940’s, is now on exhibit at the Frazier History Museum through November 9th - nearly 150 large prints and 3 screens running slideshows. We are immensely proud of it and urge you to go see it. But our work is not done. We are presently editing over 100,000 photographs into a book to be published by the University Press of Kentucky. We need funding to pay our writers and designers and cover publication costs. Will you help us? Learn more at:  http://kydocphoto.com.  Watch our video below to see some of the imagery we've been creating. 

AND... We're working with Kertis Creative to produce a film about our Project for broadcast on Public Television. Take a look at the teaser for it in the media gallery below. 

THANK YOU!

Who We Are

Our current project is the second iteration of the Kentucky Documentary Photographic Project (KDPP) and is the third major photographic survey of the State in the past 80 years. During the 1930’s and early 1940’s the Farm Security Administration sent some of America’s leading photographers across the country to “introduce America to Americans.” Part propaganda, part social activism, and part visual history, that work has now also been widely accepted as “art,” forming much of our impression of life, especially rural life, during the Great Depression. Several of those photographers, most notably Marion Post Wolcott, but also Ben Shahn, Russell Lee, and John Vachon, worked in Kentucky during that time period, documenting and describing both the land and its people.
With the work of these and other notable 20th Century documentarians as inspiration, 3 photographers – Ted Wathen, Bob Hower, and Bill Burke - set out in the mid-1970’s to photograph in all 120 counties of Kentucky, with a goal of describing, recording and interpreting what the State and its communities looked like, to create a time capsule as it were, which could be opened later by those seeking to know and understand life in Kentucky during the time of America’s Bicentennial. Funded in large part by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, we slept in our cars or camped, cooked our own food, and scoured the ins and outs of the State for subject matter over the course of 3 years, producing thousands of black and white negatives in various film formats. While artists at heart, we also well understood the importance of impartial description and recording what was in front of our eyes, knowing that what might seem mundane today would be valuable and rare as time erased the present world and memories faded. The work from those 3 years was shown at the Speed Art Museum, The Smithsonian American Art Museum, The George Eastman House, The Kentucky Historical Society, and a number of other venues. 60 prints from the original project are in the collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum. After lying dormant for a number of years, in 2011, as part of Louisville’s Photo Biennial, the project was revived. Scans were made from the original negatives and then printed to 2’ x 3’ scale, and approximately 90 images were exhibited at the Frazier History Museum. The show was a resounding success and audience members urged us to do the project again. So we did. This time, however, we hired a much broader and more diverse team of 24 additional photographers to join 2 of the original three team members on the new version of the Project. Although we are documentarians, we also believe that the best of our work rises above journalism and description to art; that our best imagery is personal, evocative, complex, and says something larger about Kentucky and the human condition.